When a Republic Forgets to Become Modern
A requiem for Hindutva…?
There are moments when a democracy seems to leave the buildings built to house it and move into the streets outside. Parliament continues to sit. Ministers continue to speak. Television studios continue their nightly theatre. Yet for several weeks now, the moral energy of the Republic has gathered at Jantar Mantar, where the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has led students and young job aspirants in a sit-in over the alleged NEET paper leak, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and, more sweepingly, of the Prime Minister himself. Sonam Wangchuk, still recovering from six months in detention over Ladakh’s statehood demand, joined the protest on hunger strike and was hospitalised, insisting he would not eat until student demands were met.
One can feel Delhi without being there. The July humidity sits over every video that reaches a phone screen. Young men and women who borrowed money for the journey sleep on platforms, fed by strangers who have organised langars and water for people they will never meet again. There is anger, but there is also an unreported tenderness, someone fanning an exhausted stranger with cardboard, another sharing a charger. I watch this from a room in Coimbatore where grief and the slow narrowing of my own world have made even that modest act of solidarity feel beyond reach. There is shame in admitting this and perhaps also a small honesty about how suffering isolates us from the public life we still claim to care about.
Watching these images has forced me to revisit a question I have avoided for years. I ask myself — Why did I stay quiet through the anti-CAA ( Citizens Amendment Act) protests and Shaheen Bagh and again through the farm laws agitation, but find myself moved by Wangchuk’s case in a way I was not moved by those? The answer was never a lack of sympathy for dissent. It lies elsewhere.
The Company a Movement Keeps
The anti-CAA protests drifted, fairly early, from a narrow legal question into a much larger anxiety about religious identity and in doing so the movement conveniently buried the question it should have answered first. The Act itself did something quite specific and quite defensible. It granted an accelerated path to citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who had fled religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, three constitutionally Islamic states where minority protection has been threadbare for decades. It did not strip a single Indian Muslim of citizenship and it said nothing about denying citizenship to Muslim applicants on a future, case by case basis, which remains available to them under the ordinary law exactly as it always was. The protest at Shaheen Bagh, for all its theatre of the besieged, never quite explained why a law offering refuge to persecuted minorities from three hostile, non-secular neighbours amounted to an assault on Indian Muslims already holding Indian citizenship. The cry that the NRC would render Muslims stateless borrowed its emotional force from a demographic reality the protest itself preferred not to name too loudly, that Assam (as has many states since) has for decades absorbed genuine cross-border migration from Bangladesh, some of it running into the hundreds of thousands. This fact backed by the state’s own tribunal and legislative counts is circumnavigated by CAA critics. India’s many avowedly secular political class too have surreptitiously incentivized such migration to be nurtured quietly into minority vote bank rather than resolve it. A protest can be sincere in its fear and still be selective in its arithmetic. Shaheen Bagh was both, something the political studies scholars of JNU & CSDS variety rarely highlighted, barely going beyond a persecution and victimhood of Muslim minority narrative.
The farm laws agitation carried its own comfortable fiction. It presented itself, almost without contest in the ‘liberal’ media, as the last stand of India’s most vulnerable cultivators against corporate predation. The columns of protestors filing into Delhi from Punjab and Haryana told a different story to anyone willing to look at landholding size, procurement data and the disproportionate share of minimum support price payouts that already flowed to a relatively prosperous farming class concentrated in exactly those two states. These were not, in the main, the smallholders and landless labourers on whose behalf the protest spoke. They were, in a description that will annoy some and clarify little for others, kulaks in the classical sense, a rural propertied class that had done rather well out of the existing mandi system and had no appetite for a market it could not control, dressed for the cameras in the borrowed grammar of peasant suffering. That the reform itself was clumsily drafted and worse explained does not retroactively convert its critics into the dispossessed.
Both movements, in other words, drew a coalition whose only durable agreement was opposition to Narendra Modi and both asked the country to accept their chosen victims on faith rather than on evidence. That did not make either movement illegitimate. Protest need not clear a bar of statistical purity to be democratically valid but it left me wondering when the founding constitutional question, in one case about the treatment of persecuted refugees, in the other about the terms of agricultural reform, had quietly become secondary to a larger, more familiar political contest that had very little to do with either.
Why Wangchuk Is Different
Wangchuk’s case struck me differently because he is an unlikely dissenter. He welcomed Ladakh’s separation from Jammu and Kashmir, endorsed the boycott of Chinese goods before it was fashionable, and speaks the language of national duty rather than regional grievance. When he asked the Union government to honour its own commitments on Ladakh’s constitutional future, first through the Sixth Schedule demand and then through solidarity with students over the NEET leak, he was not asking India to override its Constitution. He was asking it to take that Constitution seriously. For that, he was jailed under the National Security Act for six months, released only in March this year, and has now put his health on the line a second time in a matter of months.
No movement, however, stays clean for long. Once national attention gathered, familiar actors arrived. Political parties that showed little urgency while he fasted alone rediscovered him overnight. Sections of dubious farm unions and Left formations folded his demand into a larger campaign against the government. Some images carrying unmistakable separatist associations have begun circulating alongside a cause that had rested entirely on constitutional fidelity. Once that happens, public conversation shifts from whether promises were kept to whether the protest itself can be trusted. It is possible to support a cause and still grow uneasy about the company it starts keeping. That distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between movements that deepen a republic and coalitions that merely borrow its energy for other ends.
That unease pushed me toward a larger question. What if India’s deepest failure is not that governments break promises but that the Republic never finished the journey toward a modernity in which institutions matter more than the groups fighting to capture them?
India’s Unfinished Bourgeois Revolution
The word bourgeois has had an unfair run in India. A century of Marxist vocabulary trained us to see the bourgeoisie only as a class to be overthrown and there is truth in that charge, industrial bourgeoisie (capitalism) did produce new forms of exploitation. But that critique has crowded out something else the bourgeois revolution achieved, a fundamental change in the relationship between citizens and power. Before it, authority rested on birth and patronage. Justice depended on who one knew. Opportunity depended on proximity to those who governed.
What replaced this in Britain and later across Europe was not the result of peasants storming palaces. As Dipankar Gupta argues in Revolution from Above, much of this transformation, courts gaining independence from monarchs, municipal bodies assuming public responsibilities, schooling expanding beyond the privileged, was driven by sections of the elite who came to see that predictable institutions made for a more civilised society, not merely a richer one.
India has misunderstood this history badly. The beneficiaries of bourgeois modernity were never the bourgeoisie alone. Robust institutions matter most to those with the least power. A wealthy man can hire his way around a broken bureaucracy. A widow waiting months for her pension cannot. A large firm can absorb an unpredictable regulator. A small shopkeeper cannot. Wealth buys alternatives. Poverty has no alternative to institutions that actually work. In India, institutions instead become arenas where organised groups press sectional claims, because governments find it easier to bargain with a lobby than to strengthen an impersonal system whose benefits are shared too widely and too slowly to win an election. Wangchuk’s insistence that the state simply behave constitutionally looks modest next to this history, but it is in fact the exact demand on which every durable liberal democracy has rested. A bourgeois modernity asks citizens to trust procedures rather than patrons. This was indeed what our constitution is about in spirit and intent.
Can Hindutva Become Bourgeois?
This is where my disagreement with contemporary Hindutva begins. I have never accepted the liberal-left habit of calling it fascism in Indian dress, a description that says more about the anxieties of the people using it than about the movement itself. But acknowledging its legitimacy does not require ignoring its limits and the chief limit is sociological rather than ideological. For all its success in attracting industrialists and an aspirational middle class, the moral imagination of Hindutva still carries the instincts of the petty bourgeoisie — intensely patriotic, deeply suspicious of institutions it cannot direct toward a national purpose, more comfortable with display than with confidence.
That disposition was never confined to the trading castes with which the phrase is usually associated. It has an agrarian mirror too, in the feudal muscle of India’s OBC and regional movements, formations that spent the better part of the last century organising not around a demand for impersonal institutions but around the older grammar of community, land and lineage. The Mandal-era assertion of backward caste politics, whatever justice it delivered in redistributing state power away from a narrow upper-caste elite, rarely produced a parallel appetite for the rule of law as an end in itself. It produced instead a durable culture of caste solidarity translated directly into state patronage, where the goal was never to weaken the discretionary power of government but to capture it for one’s own community’s turn at the trough. That is not a modern institutional demand. It is the older, feudal logic of tribute simply redirected through the ballot box.
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Hindutva’s real achievement over the past decade and its deeper failure, is that it has learned to absorb this exact constituency rather than transform it. That achievement should not be waved away too quickly.
Welding India’s disparate social denominations into a single cultural-religious imagination, where Hinduism understood through its own claims to catholicity, tolerance and reverence for both fellow humans and the natural world, is a genuinely credible way of conceiving a modern nation-state. It indeed has found resonance among ordinary Indians that a deracinated secular-liberalism, helmed by leftist and left off center liberals of Yogender Yadav, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Rajeev Bhargava types speaking in the borrowed vocabulary of rights and procedure alone, has never quite managed. An imagined community needs some pre-political material to work with and Hindutva supplied material that liberal secularism, for all its constitutional merits, could not manufacture on its own. But — and this is the key point — an imagined community of this kind is a means toward a modern liberal republic, not a substitute for one and a means that forgets it is only a means eventually curdles into the very thing it was meant to civilise. This is precisely where the BJP has turned Hindutva’s achievement into its failure.
The eighteenth Lok Sabha seated around 85 OBC members from BJP, a fact the party advertises as social justice delivered. What it rarely admits is that this arithmetic achievement has travelled with no corresponding argument for why caste-based patronage should now give way to caste-blind institutions.
Hindutva did not defeat the feudal logic of OBC politics, it franchised it, offering community leaders a seat at the national table in exchange for folding their local patronage networks into a larger Hindu unity that asks for cultural conformity rather than constitutional restraint. A movement that has succeeded by multiplying the very caste arithmetic it claims to transcend has very little standing left to lecture anyone about modernity.
The European difference
Europe’s own reckoning with religion and democracy offers a more exacting model than Hindutva has yet cared to study. The Christian Democratic parties that rose in Germany, Italy, Austria and the Low Countries after 1945 did not emerge from a comfortable civilisational confidence. They emerged from the wreckage of a continent that had just watched nationalism dressed in religious and racial memory burn itself out, and their founders, Germany’s Konrad Adenauer chief among them, explicitly blamed that catastrophe on the fusion of religious identity with an unrestrained nation-state. Their answer was not to abandon their Catholic and Protestant inheritance, which they treated as a genuine source of moral seriousness, but to rebuild it around institutions that no future strongman could bend to his own reading of the faith, an independent judiciary, a free press, universities the party did not control. This was not secularism by another name. The CDU called itself a Christian party for its entire existence but it married that religious self-description to constitutional restraint rather than treating restraint as a foreign imposition on civilisational identity.
Hindutva has had no equivalent moment of reckoning, no defeat serious enough to force the same reconsideration and perhaps that is precisely the problem. It has been permitted to expand its social base, absorb regional and OBC formations and win successive national majorities without ever being required to answer the one question Adenauer’s generation could not avoid, what happens to those who do not share the majority’s religious memory once that memory is placed at the centre of the state’s self-understanding? It has shown, so far, that it can hold power. It has not yet shown that it can hold that particular line.
At Jantar Mantar today, the anger visible is aimed squarely at the man and the movement that claimed to speak for Hindu civilisational confidence twelve years ago. That rallying call now sounds hollow, an empty slogan stripped of the ethical grounding it once promised.
A New Secularity Without Depth?
There is, however, a curious twist to this year’s protest that neither the CAA agitation nor the farm laws anticipated. The CJP demonstration is, in one sense, the most modern protest Jantar Mantar has hosted in years. In the face of it the CJP organized and Wangchuk inspired agitation. asks for nothing except that an examination system behave predictably and without discretionary interference. But on the other hand the deep disillusionment, dismay and disgust of the highly anxious and stressed students with a government high on (misleading) proclamations and zilch on delivery and substance is evident in their persistence and intensity of their protest. Yet it carries no religious colouring, no regional grievance, no community arithmetic. Structurally, it is exactly the demand bourgeois modernity is meant to install, an impersonal institution rather than a patron. In that narrow sense, Gen Z’s protest is more constitutionally literate than Shaheen Bagh or the farm laws ever were, even if none of them marching toward Parliament would describe it in those terms.
But modern is not the same as deep and this is where the harder question sits. Suppose every demand were met tomorrow, transparent examinations, predictable counselling, an accountable National Medical Commission and National Testing Agency. Would it produce a different kind of doctor, or merely the same doctor through a fairer gate? This is an issue that needs a separate debate, something I have discussed in another post on my substack. For the moment let me just say that the rejig that India needs mandates a more normative and epistemical shift that sooner than later movements particularly of the CJP kind needs to confront and offer a roadmap for enduring change.
As things stand the horizon of such protest under an informal organization like CJP is organised around an acute administrative grievance. Nobody occupying a pavement for three weeks in Delhi’s heat is thinking about the epistemology of medical training. They are thinking about whether a leaked paper destroyed a year of their life and that is a legitimate and sufficient thing to be thinking about. These students are, after all, products of the very educational order they now seek to reform and asking them to simultaneously fight for procedural justice and interrogate the cultural economy that made medicine their only imaginable ladder is asking a great deal of twenty year olds who were merely doing what they were told would secure a life. Yet to reiterate again in times to come movements like this should take up issues in all its substantive variability to ensure a truly liberal democratic and just social order engendered through institutional robustness, autonomy and accountability.
On the other hand whether Hindutva survives this moment will not depend on how many elections it wins or temples it completes. Civilisations are remembered for the institutions they leave behind, not the power they briefly held. A movement so fluent in the language of civilisational values should have found Wangchuk the easiest citizen to embrace, a man asking the state to honour its word and preserve an ecological inheritance that sits comfortably inside any serious reading of India’s own traditions. That it instead met him with indifference once electoral arithmetic shifted suggests Hindutva may be confusing the capture of state power with the renewal of a civilisation. A civilisation earns moral authority by teaching governments that a parliamentary majority does not entitle them to everything. Bourgeois modernity did not merely redistribute power, it domesticated it through institutions that restrain every government, sympathetic or not. Without that lesson, Hindutva will remain what its critics already call it, an insecure nationalism dressed in borrowed civilisational language, unable to prove otherwise.
The Republic We Still Have to Build
At Jantar Mantar not every slogan deserves applause and neither every individual and group gathered there shares the same democratic imagination. But the reels, images that stack my instagram feed remind me that India can still produce citizens who want promises to be kept, a constitution that is more than a legal document and a governments that should answer for their own words without needing to be dragged into the street first. That faith deserves better than being used by parties that arrive only once the cameras do and better than being wrapped in sectarian symbolism that lets the state change the subject.
The Republic inherited in 1947 was an extraordinary achievement. The Republic still waiting to be built is a separate task altogether, one that needs institutions commanding trust rather than obedience, a federal compact honoured in spirit and not merely in text and a political culture where citizens are not forced to choose between their civilisational identity and their constitutional conscience. Wangchuk’s lonely persistence, first in a Jodhpur cell and now on a hospital bed, suggests these were never actually in conflict. The tragedy is not that India lacks the moral resources to reconcile them. It is that those who invoke civilisation most loudly have still not understood that a civilisation is judged, in the end, by the republic it leaves behind.
(Disclosure: For readers who imagine AI to be a mysterious black box that presses a button labelled “Write Essay”, I regret to report that it remains disappointingly more pedestrian. It searched, retrieved, argued, objected, corrected and occasionally exposed my own lazy reasoning. It neither conceived the thesis nor reached the conclusions. Like a good research assistant, it was indispensable. Like all good research assistants, it still required someone to know what questions were worth asking.)
